Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications handle error situations by mapping managed exception objects to SOAP fault objects and SOAP fault objects to managed exception objects. The topics in this section discuss how to design contracts to expose error conditions as custom SOAP faults, how to return such faults as part of service implementation, and how clients catch such faults.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides numerous extensibility points that allow developers to customize the runtime behavior for service dispatching and client proxy invocation. This article shows you how this process works.

Here we take a look at WCF clients and services, and explain how to tweak the addressing and message filtering behaviors so you can route services between them.

This article will walk you through the process of creating and consuming two simple services.

Windows Communication Foundation is one of main new technologies that are included in .NET 3.0. In this article, as the first part of his Windows Communication Foundation tutorials, Keyvan introduces Windows Communication Foundation and some principles behind it.

After writing two articles and introducing Windows Communication Foundation and its fundamentals, Keyvan talks about coding with this new technology in .NET 3.0, its programming model and development process.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's services-oriented framework for building connected systems using the Microsoft .NET Framework. Although WCF is flexible enough to build arbitrary services-based solutions, its primary story is Web Services. To get the most out of this article, you should have at least a basic understanding of core WCF concepts including messaging, serialization, contracts, and bindings/endpoint configuration. This article was written based on .NET 3.5, the Beta 2 release.

This article discusses:
Invocation models in Windows Communication Foundation, one-way and callback operations, duplex callbacks and events, a publish-subscribe framework

There are a number of important design constraints that you must accommodate in your application when combining Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and user-interface (UI) applications. This article explains and illustrates these constraints, and shares best practices and design guidelines.

MSDN Magazine article covers the basics of WCF Messaging.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) enables disconnected work between clients and services. The client posts messages to a queue and the service processes them later. Such interaction permits a different programming model from the default request/response pattern, enabling possibilities such as load leveling, improved availability, and compensating work, to name just a few. This column starts with a brief introduction to Windows® Communication Foundation queued calls and then presents an interesting problem-how to get results out of a queued call-and the solution via some cool Windows Communication Foundation programming techniques and a few helper classes the author wrote for this purpose.

This article will detail step by step instructions to consume COM+ application services from WCF clients. We will also discuss how legacy applications can use applications that expose WCF services built on .NET 3.0.

Shows how to configure the ASP.NET profile service on a Web server to make it available to clients that use the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

In this article Keyvan shows how to implement an asynchronous pattern in Windows Communication Foundation for services and clients to enable easy execution of long running operations.

This article discusses HTTP message basics, Adding information to URIs, WCF and HTTP, and RSS/ATOM with WCF
 

Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition is a collection of resources for modeling and building Web services for Windows Communication Foundation and ASMX.

Long-running processes are common in distributed computing. Some business processes are made up of multiple execution sequences which may last many days or even weeks. They may involve clients (or even end users) that connect to the application, perform a small amount of work, transition the workflow to a new state, and then disconnect for an indeterminate amount of time before connecting again and continuing the workflow. The clients may at any point decide to terminate the workflow and start a new one, or the back-end workflow service may end it. With this intermittent flow, do you keep proxies and services in memory waiting for the clients to call?
This column will discuss several techniques for supporting such long-running services and answer some of these common questions. It will also present the accompanying Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) facilities and a few helper classes the author has developed.

It is true that Silverlight™ 2 makes it easy to build rich internet applications (RIAs) with tremendous graphical prowess. However, it is also true that Silverlight 2 makes it easy to build highly functional line-of-business (LOB) applications. Silverlight 2 supports a subset of the powerful XAML-based data binding that Windows® Presentation Foundation (WPF) enables. The XAML binding markup extensions in Silverlight 2 simplify the process of binding entities to Silverlight controls. Because they run completely on the client computer, Silverlight applications are isolated from the entities that are managed on the server. Therefore service-based communication through technologies such as RSS, Representational State Transfer (REST), and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) must be available. Fortunately, Silverlight 2 supports interaction with these and other communication pathways, enabling Silverlight applications to interact seamlessly with back-end LOB applications.

Explains you how you can implement security on a WCF service.

This article discusses Windows CardSpace and information cards, beb browsers and identity selectors, security tokens, and integration with WSFederationHttpBinding and ASP.NET membership

A short list of the best practices to consider when creating secure applications using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Using the PIAB you can enhance WCF services with policies such as validation, performance monitoring, authorization and caching without having to change a line of code.

The April 2008 installment of this column discussed the lack of adequate support for code access security (CAS) and the motivation for adding proper CAS support to the Windows® Communication Foundation (WCF). It then proceeded to show how to add that support on the client side, enabling partially trusted clients to call WCF services, all without compromising on security or on the WCF programming model.
This issue will show you what it takes to complete the picture by allowing partially trusted services and partially turreted hosts. As with the client side, you will see not just the mechanics of the solution but also the approach and the thought process leading to it. You will also get to see some advanced programming techniques in the WCF and Microsoft® .NET Framework.

Once you start adopting service-oriented principles for your distributed applications, the security challenges become slightly different. You suddenly realize that you are crossing a security boundary for every service call you make.
Typically—though not necessarily—there will be a network between the sender and the recipient of a service call. While authentication is usually handled automatically by the communication framework, you still have to come up with your own authorization strategy and infrastructure.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides powerful facilities for implementing authorization in services. You have the choice between an easy-to-use, role-based system as well as a more powerful, but more complex, claims-based API. The remainder of this article will compare both systems and show how to use them to implement robust service authorization.

With the NET Framework 3.5, Windows Workflow Foundation can now truly be integrated with Windows Communication Foundation. This column describes how the integration works and how to make use of it effectively.